The High Missouri (8 page)

Not that there had been time to talk. The canoe road had been mostly upstream. Often up rapids and waterfalls. Or down them, which was even more dangerous.

The canoes of the NorthWest Company that were headed for the bit interior depot, Fort William, the center of the company’s operations on Lake Superior, went up the Ottawa River from Montreal, through a network of rivers and lakes to Georgian Bay, across the bay—Dylan’s first look at what the French called the sweetwater seas—along the northern edge of Lake Huron, and across the entire northern shore of Superior to the depot.

You not only paddled the canoe against the current, you poled it. Sometimes you cordelled it (pulled it with a long rope). When things got really tough—because there were big rapids, or you had to cross a divide—you portaged.

Dru told Dylan these portages were easy, laughably easy, because the outfit bore almost no freight. They seemed unpleasant enough to Dylan. The three of them beached the canoe, unloaded the four bundles, or
pièces
, of goods they were taking along, and then loaded up Saga—two bundles packed on his hips and held in place by a tumpline across his forehead, 180 pounds of weight altogether. Saga just grunted and moved out—at a trot. Dru and Dylan put the canoe upright, not bottom up, on their shoulders and followed him. Then Dylan and Dru went back and hauled the other two
pièces
, one each to make it easy on a beginner like Dylan, said Dru.

It was done quickly but not easily, because Dru and Saga portaged at a pace full of fury, for reasons that were never explained. At the far end of the portage they’d get seated, Dru would mutter something about Dylan having it too easy, and push off.

They worked like brutes every day. They moved the canoe—paddling, poling, cordelling, portaging—from daylight to dusk. As they came into the longest days of the year, this meant sixteen hours a day. The only respite was a stop every hour for a pipe. And a little time at dawn and sunset, for the wretched
sagamité
.

If Dylan had come to the wilds for freedom, this seemed more like slavery.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“After the grail,” replied the Druid.

Dylan couldn’t remember what grail he’d pledged to pursue.

Dylan staggered sideways. He lurched into a birch tree, and it propped him up before he could fall to the ground. He sank to his knees.

He had never felt so awful in his life. His legs were shaking. Not just quivering, actually shaking. He was grateful to be on his knees, so they couldn’t clatter against each other.

His back ached. His neck was screaming at him. He eased his head back against the tumpline, but it followed him, and that made pain shoot up his neck at a new angle.

He cursed the two ninety-pound
pièces
strapped onto his back. He cursed portaging. He cursed the distance he’d come, slowly and painfully, across the path, the rocks, the duff, the muskeg of the portage. He cursed the stumbles, the rocks that hurt his feet, the mud that sucked at his moccasins, and most of all the steepness of the route—not only the climbs, which strained his legs mightily, but the parts that looked flat and were uphill, and especially the parts that were downhill and made his thighs labor to keep man and burden from rollicking down the trail.

If only he could fall and roll like a rock to the end of the portage.

He cursed the cache they’d raised, which made four extra
pièces
of ninety pounds each. He cursed the Nor’Westers who invented this so-called heroic tradition—to either make pork eaters into real men,
hommes du nord
, or break them. He saved his most bitter curses for those said to carry three of these
pièces
, 270 pounds, to show off. He profaned the tradition of running portages at a trot, fully loaded. He swore at the NorthWest Company. He blasphemed the Hudson’s Bay Company, which made this tactic necessary. He cursed the Welsh Indians, if this was their lot, and the High Missouri, wherever it was. He cursed the fur trade itself.

Most particularly and bitterly he cursed his mentor, Morgan Griffiths Morgan Bleddyn, who claimed to think this test was good for him, and maybe even thought it was funny.

He wanted to fail it. He wanted to go home. He wanted to eat his favorite dessert, syallabub, instead of
sagamité
. He wanted Claude and their rooms. He wanted a book to read. He even wanted the bank, and Mr. MacDonald. He wanted his father.

No, goddamn it, as a matter of fact, his father was what he didn’t want. He was Dylan Davies now, and proud of it.

He looked around. Time to do it. He got from his knees onto one foot, then the other, leaned his burden against the tree and pushed.

Nothing. He couldn’t get the rest of the way up.

Dylan fought back tears. He would become a real Nor’Wester.

He centered his burden, the
pièces
, carefully on the tree. He squirmed his feet back under his bottom. He squeezed his thighs encouragingly with his hands.

Now. He groaned as he pushed—a ferocious moment of pushing.

Nothing.

Idea. He would inchworm his way up the tree—first his bottom, then the top of the
pièces
.

Bottom against tree—it worked. Felt like a corncob, but it worked. Now the top
piece
. He arched far back. Got the right angle. Pushed.

Lost his balance. Pitched sideways. Toppled onto his face.

He couldn’t breathe. He tried to suck and drew nothing. Desperate, he turned his face to the side, out of the damp muck of the leaves. Still nothing. He tried to draw in sweet air—wasn’t there a sky full of air?—and got nothing.

Then, suddenly, his lungs heaved, and shuddered, and filled.

Tears came.

Lying in the muck, he wiped his face, and his hand came away bloody.

He bled and cried lava flows into the fetid and fecund turf.

Something touched his shoulder.

He wrenched his body to roll over and went nowhere. The
pièces
lay on him like boulders, crushing him.

He twisted his head sideways. Saga was poking him with a knife.

So Saga was heading back for his second trip already. Dylan told himself that the knife meant nothing, it was just one of Saga’s standoffish ways. The half-breed didn’t shake hands either. Or talk to him.

Dylan dry-heaved.

He wanted to die.

Dylan sobbed. He beat the earth with his fists.

Saga slipped the tumpline off Dylan’s forehead. He rolled the
pièces
off onto the ground. He sat back on his haunches and watched Dylan.

What a strange Englishman, thought Saga. His people called all white people Frenchmen, but this was an Englishman. Not a bad fellow, really. Eager, good-spirited, willing to learn. Then moody sometimes. And now self-pitying.

Saga felt not quite right in the way he was treating this stranger, not talking to him. But the stranger wouldn’t accept that he was a stranger. He wanted to be a comrade from the start. He didn’t know the distance that must lie between a Metis, any Metis man, and an Englishman. He didn’t know about the longtime enmity. He assumed too much.

And there was the matter of Dru’s attitude toward this Englishman. Saga remembered once standing in that garden with Dru and looking through the windows at this Dylan, this… Dru had acted foolish over him.

Saga did not feel foolish. Monsieur Dylan Davies would have to earn his way, all of it. And if Saga’s silence bothered him, well, there was something for him to learn in it.

For now, though, the Englishman needed a hand.

For long moments Dylan lay still. He refused to look up at the half-breed. It seemed unbearable to accept a kindness from a man who didn’t even talk to you. Finally, Dylan rolled onto his side and drew his legs to his chest. Then he sat up. Looked Saga in the eyes.

Amused. The bastard’s eyes looked amused.

Saga lit his little white clay pipe, puffed, and watched Dylan. He didn’t offer a smoke.

Dylan brushed himself off. He stood up. He had no idea what he would do now. He’d failed.

He heard the scraping of canvas.

Saga stood there with the
pièces
in his arms and a quizzical look on his face. No one lifted 180 pounds easily, but Saga had done it in a matter-of-fact way.

Dylan submitted to his fate. He turned his back to Saga and accepted the weight of the bundle on his hips and shoulders, the pull of the tumpline on his forehead.

Without a word he turned down the trail, ordering his legs not to collapse, at least until he was out of sight of Saga, who was sitting there, puffing his pipe contentedly.

Dylan thought, I’m going to die before I make half of the first trip. On my gravestone, a miserable wooden slab, they’ll write with a burnt stick, “Not a true Nor’Wester.”

Then Dylan realized. The bastard Saga still hadn’t spoken to him.

Upstream, downstream, across lakes no one had ever heard of, every which way Dylan could imagine, off the regular canoe highway, for reasons Dylan didn’t know. Twice they stopped near forts somewhere, Dylan had no idea where. He and Saga would stay in camp several miles from the fort while Dru went in to talk to someone. He never said who, or why, or what he told them. It was the bloody war with HBC, but that’s all Dylan knew.

HBC had a prior claim on nearly everything, it seemed. Some king long dead had made things difficult for everyone by giving the company a grant of all the land which drained into Hudson’s Bay, which the nabob couldn’t even point to on a map. So the Nor’Westers were intruders, if the grant was valid.

Which according to the Nor’Westers, it wasn’t. We French were in all this country before you bloody British heard of it, they claimed, and even beyond into Athabasca, so we have prior rights.

But, said the Hudson Bay men, you Nor’Westers are mere pedlars, chasers after money, while we British have a noble and imperial vision.

Bloody hell, said the Nor’Westers, we know the Indians, we understand them—hell, we
are
them. You want to make them into proper little lords and ladies.

And so it went. Each company resented the other, fought bitterly for the furs, competed with maniacal intensity. The HBC, though, didn’t have the expertise of the Nor’Westers—the knowledge of the country, of the Indians, their languages and ways. Nor did they have the enterprise. So they always followed the Nor’West men into new country and set up a post a mile or so away. Imitators and leeches, the Nor’Westers called them.

Habitually, and gleefully, the outfits bribed Indians loyal to the other. When convenient, they stole from each other. Occasionally, they murdered. Sometimes they took each other’s forts by force of arms. Once in a while, hypocritically, they got warrants and arrested each other for these various crimes.

So what messages was Dru delivering? He wouldn’t tell. Just wartime intelligence, he murmured.

He got Dylan utterly lost. All Dylan knew was that they were somewhere in Rupert’s Land, the vast area of fine fur country in the watershed of Hudson’s Bay. He didn’t know where within two hundred miles. All he really knew was that he wanted to stop paddling.

“Top o’ the mornin’ to ye.”

It was the Druid, grinning at him and beaming at him with his lamp of an eye.

Then he saw what was wrong. It was morning, not night, and he was waking in the light, for a change. Dru had let them all sleep in.

It didn’t mean much to Dylan. He was always exhausted. Always thirsty. Always hungry. He felt needy in ways he hadn’t known he could need. And he was continually humiliated by his weakness on all the portages. Saga never mentioned it. He only smiled, mockingly. Dylan looked often at the scalp dangling from his sash, and wondered why on earth he kept it. It made the crown of his head itch.

“I said, ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to ye,’” repeated Dru. A Welshman acting the Irishman. Dru had many faces, many roles, many guises, which he interchanged playfully. One of his games was keeping information to himself—any information, like where they were going, and where the High Missouri was.

“Bottom of the universe up yours,” replied Dylan indifferently. Right now he didn’t feel like playing.

Dru chuckled warmly and clapped Dylan on his blanketed shoulder.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said.

“I need a drink and a thousand harem girls to fan me and rub oil on my aching body,” murmured Dylan. He could barely get the words out.

I must not think of women carnally.

Dru lit up. “Well, that might be possible. I do have high wine stashed upstream ten more miles. But first you have to get there and meet my family.”

“Your
what
?”

“My family,” Dru repeated. “At the village above. I’m your familiar spirit, but I’m Anastasie’s mate.”

Chapter Seven

There was almost no current against them. Though Dylan barely dipped his paddle in the water, the couple of miles went quickly. He was thinking, You never know with Dru. As you never know he has a family until he drops it casually.

They pulled the canoe onto a beach near some wigwams. No people ran to greet them, but scores of dogs did.

Dru waved to someone—some women—and left Saga and Dylan to bring the loads. If Dru expressed eagerness to see his family, it was only in the spring of his step.

It was a birchbark wigwam on the edge of the Indian camp. Dru’s people were apparently three women, who were moving around an outdoor fire, cooking.

Before Dru could offer any introductions, Dylan sagged to the ground, got out of the
piece
, and collapsed full length on the earth. Dru grinned.

Women were present. Dylan felt a little self-conscious about his clothes. He had gotten used to shirt, breechcloth, and moccasins on the canoe road, with just Dru and Saga. But now, in a sort of society, they seemed silly.

The oldest woman handed Dylan a wooden bowl full of stew and a metal spoon. “I’m Anastasie,” she said with a smile.

He liked her immediately. She was a handsome woman in her forties, striking in a plain, strong way. She was tall, taller than Dru or himself, with an athletic-looking body. She looked him in the eye with the confidence and directness of a man. Though she was light-skinned, gray-eyed, and had rusty hair streaked with gray, an Indian facial structure shone beneath the white-man features—strong bones, wide nose, and wide cheeks.

Dylan ate lying stretched out. It was some sort of meat and something they called wild rice in a thick, pungent gravy. Eating it felt like swigging a magic potion. He could feel relief flowing into his legs, making them tingle. Into his back, into the muscles of his neck, into his arms, even into his fingers.

Anastasie filled his bowl again, and Dru’s and Saga’s bowls.

Now the women sat on the ground and ate.

Dylan rested his cheek on the ground. He noticed how cool and delicious it felt.

He woke up a little. Hands, strong hands on his neck.

“You need to learn not to strain your head forward into the tumpline,” said Dru. He was squatting near Dylan’s head. Dylan didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Weight on his ass. Hips—human being sitting on him. He turned his head and looked back. A glimpse of face.

One of the strong hands pushed his face back down.

Female human being, tickled at him.

“You haven’t been introduced to my sister Marguerite,” said Anastasie’s voice.

“Sister in the Cree manner,” put in Dru, “cousin in the white way.”

Dylan crooked his head to look at her.

Marguerite pushed his head down again. “Lie still and enjoy,” she said. Her hands moved under his shirt to the muscles between his neck and shoulders. They felt strong, understanding, altogether wonderful.

Down onto his back. Onto his side ribs.

Onto his ass.

“Whoa!” said Dylan, wriggling. The breechcloth left most of his ass bare.

Dru stayed him with a hand on the back. “Let her do it,” he said. “It’s her way, and it will help you.”

Against his better judgment, Dylan tried to relax. Did relax—he was so tired, and it felt so sweet.

Marguerite turned around and sat backward on his ass. He was aware as she sat down that she was not slender. Her hands felt good on the backs of his thighs, the outside of his thighs—the inside of his bare thighs.

He squirmed.

Marguerite thumped her hips into him. “Be still,” she ordered.

He lay there and got rubbed. And lay there. And turned over on command. And permitted the front of his thighs to be rubbed, and his arms, and his chest, even his nipples, and finally his forehead and the small areas around his eyeballs. There Marguerite’s fingers found painful pockets of tension, and worked little miracles. So sweet.

Finally she lifted off him. Dru offered him a hand to sit up. Dylan could have sworn Marguerite looked at him lecherously. She handed him a cup.

“High wine,” said Dru. “Drink it, and we’ll have a smoke.”

Dru loaned Dylan a pipe, a small white clay affair like the one the old man kept tucked through the pouch around his neck, what he called his
gage d’amour
. Just kinnikinnick, he said, not proper tobacco like they would get in the
regales
at Fort William. That fort on Lake Superior, Dylan knew, was the center of the North West Company’s operations in the wilderness. Dru and Saga kept talking about the tobacco, the food, brandy, and other grandeurs available there.

They lit the pipes with embers from the fire and puffed silently for a while, and had nips of the high wine, a fancy word for trade alcohol mixed with creek water.

The women moved around doing small chores and then gathered close. Dylan had trouble keeping his eyes off Marguerite—her hands had made him feel all foolish. She kept smiling like she had a secret.

I must not think of Indian women carnally.

“Sarah,” said Dru without getting up, “this is my friend Dylan Elfed Davies, a pilgrim, Welsh Indian, and seeker of the grail. Dylan, this is Lady Sarah, Saga’s wife.” Out of some obscure need, Dylan stood. As he inclined his head to her, he nearly toppled over. Dru gave him a hand back to the ground. Lady Sarah looked nothing like a lady. She was short, plump, and bulldog-faced. Her habitual expression seemed to be a sensual smirk. She gave the introduction only the faintest acknowledgment.

“And these good people all together”—his arm embraced Anastasie, her cousin Marguerite, Saga, and Lady Sarah—“are my family
sauvage
.” One of the secrets, Dylan thought, you like to keep as long as you can.

“The women are more or less Cree. Children, far back, of French-Canadian fathers and women of the country. Now children simply of the country, half savages. Half may not be enough.” He laughed at his little witticism.

“They travel with us sometimes, and live here sometimes, and sometimes at Fort William, usually with the Crees. Saga is a Red River breed.” Dylan didn’t dare ask what that was. “They are not Welsh Indians,” Dru said.

“Where are the Welsh Indians?” Dylan asked once more. From what Dylan could gather, no one but Dru had even heard of them.

“I will say this much: the dreaming Celtic eye is here upon this continent. In these lands men breathe in vision with the very air.”

Dylan interrupted. “What do you mean, ‘the dreaming Celtic eye’?” Sometimes he got impatient with Dru’s Celtic mysticism. He wanted to sleep.

Now Dru turned the lamp eye on him. It made Dylan nervous—he always felt ridiculously exposed by that eye. Tonight he had inebriation to reveal. The day’s hard work had left him not a spiritual creature, not intellectual, not emotional, but physical alone, and half drunk.

“I’m sorry you do not know,” the Druid said slowly. “They do not teach such things at the College de Montreal, do they? No, they teach that the universe is a clock, ingeniously devised by God, ticking away in perfect, natural order. Hah-hah!” He wagged a finger at Dylan. “The Druid has heard a thing or two.”

Dru got serious. “Well, it won’t wash, this mechanical world. For it has blood and breath in it, lad, and even spirit. The dreaming eye lets you see that.”

He tapped out his pipe and refilled it. “No man can explain the dreaming eye, but every man can find it within himself. Let me tell you a story.”

He raised his voice into a songlike narrative:

“A midwife of Llangwrog in Gwynedd, Meg of name, was shopping at the market in Caernarfon. A tall and handsome stranger approached her there. ‘Come quickly,’ said he, ‘my wife is about to deliver a child.’ The stranger put Meg up behind him on a splendid black stallion, and away they galloped, swift as the wind.

“Through a dark wood they rode, to the top of a ridge, and there it stood—a grand castle, handsome and glittering. In the castle in a beautiful chamber lay a lovely woman on a fine four-poster bed, near her time. And presently she brought forth a gorgeous boy child.

“‘Here,’ said the handsome man, handing Meg a vial. ‘Rub this ointment on the child’s eyes, but make sure it doesn’t touch your own.’

“Rubbing the ointment in, Meg blundered—she got a speck of it into her right eye. Instantly everything was different—the castle was a hovel, the bed a pile of rushes, and the lovely woman was only Myfawnwy, a poor woman of the town.

“Terrified, Meg let out a chilling scream and ran for her life—out of the hovel, over the ridge, through the dark wood. She never slowed down until she was home in Llangwrog.

“Months later she suddenly saw the man again, at the market. Boldly, she went up and asked him, ‘How is Myfawnwy?’

“‘She is well,’ he replied. ‘Tell me, which eye are you seeing me with?’

“‘The right eye,’ answered Meg.

“Without a word the man raised his walking stick and poked the eye out.”

The Druid chuckled to himself, and studied Dylan.

Dylan thought the story was dumb.

“Your bed is laid in the trees,” said Anastasie. “Marguerite will show you.”

Marguerite took Dylan’s hand to lead him through the darkness. The night was filled with moon shadows. Light and dark played on the new grass and on the shimmering leaves of the birches. All was elusive, mysterious, perhaps frightening.

Everyone else seemed to be sleeping in the wigwam, he thought—why am I alone exiled to the trees?

He was a little unsteady from the high wine, and needed Marguerite’s hand. Her flesh felt pleasant.
I must not think of Indian women carnally.

It was a low lean-to of canvas, nestled in a grove. Marguerite led him close, let go his hand, and lit the candle lantern hanging from a pole. The light shone warm and yellow on the interior of the lean-to. It struck him as picturesque—cool, white moonlight dancing on a world of darkness, and in the middle of it the warm, yellow light on his bed place.

His blankets were laid out. Beneath them were a buffalo robe and more blankets. Perhaps Marguerite’s blankets.

She gave a chuckle, low and affectionate.

She put her arms on his waist and gave a playful tug.

Dylan lurched and stumbled. She pulled him and held him and swung him down before he knew it, flat on his back on the blankets.

She straddled him at the hips again, pinning him, and reached for the buttons on his shirt.

Dylan felt something take hold of him from inside. His hips lurched sideways—it didn’t feel like he was doing it, the hips just took over. His arms pushed Marguerite the rest of the way off him.

“No,” he said softly, “I can’t.” He meant it—he couldn’t. It wasn’t a choice. Holy Mary Mother of God, he said to himself, a twenty-two-year-old virgin. He didn’t know whether the name of the virgin was spoken as an oath or in reverence.

Marguerite cocked her head, looking at him appraisingly. She seemed to decide to take it lightly. “Funny Frenchman,” she said, and pinched his cheek. Then she was up and off into the darkness.

He turned and lay on his side and stared into the moon shadows. A strange world, moon shadows, where nothing was solid, all shapes were shifting, objects became phantoms and phantoms objects. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” he murmured faintly.

He had a dream—or maybe it wasn’t a dream—he thought his eyes were open, and he was seeing a fantasy. He was at the bottom of a lake in winter, when it was frozen, swimming around with a family of beavers. He could breathe perfectly, and felt content enough, except that he was cold—not painfully, terminally cold, just chill, sometimes miserably chill. The beavers could go into their lodge, but for some reason he couldn’t. Then he noticed that they were going up out of the lake. He saw that the ice had melted, and a world was half visible beyond the surface. The beavers went into this world and built dams and ate and played. For some reason, he couldn’t go. He might go, but he was afraid to. The world out there, he knew, was brightly lit, and you could even feel the warmth of the sun, like melted butter on your skin. Down here everything was tinted aquamarine, half lit, and half cold—chill, chill, chill.